“Stop it,” Frederik yelled.
“Why? Dude, it’s a Muslim terrorist and a Gypsy. I’m doing the world a fucking service here.”
Someone hoisted up Sándor’s aching body. It was Frederik. The man put his arms around Sándor and supported him, almost affectionately, it felt like, but Sándor wished he would leave him alone. Then the man pushed something cold and metallic into Sándor’s good hand and closed his fingers around it.
The grip of a pistol.
He forced his eyelids open. Yes, it was pistol. A flat, little black one. Smaller than Tommi’s.
“Shoot him,” Frederik whispered. “He’s insane! Shoot him before he kills us all.…”
Why don’t you shoot him? But his irritable question didn’t make it any further than his mind. Frederik raised his hand, placed his index finger over Sándor’s index finger on the trigger, and squeezed.
The back of the Finn’s head exploded. Sándor just had time to see the singed black hole in the face mask, approximately where the man’s mouth was. Then Tommi fell over and hit the tile floor with a jellyfish-like slap.
Frederik let go of Sándor and stood up. He stepped over the crumpled asbestos-suit-clad figure and leaned over Tommi.
Why is he holding Tommi’s hand? Sándor wondered.
But that wasn’t what Frederik was doing. He tore the gloves off Tommi’s hands. Then he picked up Tommi’s pistol and positioned it in Tommi’s dead, floppy hand, wrapping the Finn’s fingers around the grip, pretty much the way he had done with Sándor’s uncooperative fingers.
He’s going to shoot me, Sándor thought. And then he’ll shoot Nina. And make sure the asbestos man is dead, too. And then he’ll walk out of here, safe in the knowledge that no one can point their finger at Mr. Clean and say: He did it.
The flat, little pistol was still in his hand. He only had to lift it. Lift it and aim.
He couldn’t.
Come on, phrala.
He heard the voice so clearly that for a crazy instant he was sure Tamás wasn’t dead after all. It sent a jolt through him, and his finger curled around the trigger. And he fired.
Bang. Howl.
Frederik was standing in front of him with his hands folded as if he were in church, blood gushing out between his fingers. His little finger was missing.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck,” he moaned, the pitch of his voice growing higher and higher with each repetition. He staggered out the door and disappeared.
Sándor contemplated whether he had the energy to drag himself out of the building. He wasn’t sure. The asbestos-suited figure was lying still, a red stain on his chest, and Sándor couldn’t tell if there was any life behind the mask. The paint can was a few meters from him, on its side, and the sand was slowly trickling out around the edges of the lid where it wasn’t completely sealed. And the envelope with the money was also lying on the floor, so close that he could reach it if he stuck out his arm.
He stuck out his arm.
IRST NINA KNOCKED on the door, which had a little knocker with a black cast-iron lion’s head. But nothing happened. She was fairly sure she heard footsteps behind the solid front door, but it didn’t open, and she regretted choosing the closest house. She should have moved farther away from the building behind her. If Tommi or Frederik came after her now, she would be totally exposed, standing there in front of this closed door. A wide-open target, a barely moving target. The pain in her side rose and fell with her much-too-rapid breathing, and each time she inhaled, new black dots danced in front of her eyes. They could shoot her right here, and no one would ever find out where Ida was.
She stepped over to the tall, narrow window next to the door and knocked on the glass, alternating between her knuckles and her palm.
“Hello!”
Her voice made almost no sound. The shout was there, in her throat, but her tongue and dry lips refused to cooperate. Anyway, now she could see a face on the other side of the glass. An older man dismissively waving a hand lightly covered with liver spots. Nina looked down at herself. She looked terrible. The dark-blue tracksuit was covered with construction dust, and her right arm jutted out awkwardly to the side to keep her from touching her rib. She tried to smile, but the face inside the window had already started backing away. Farther and farther away. She knocked again, but this time without much conviction.
“Hello? I need help!”
There was no response.
Nina turned around and stared back at the mosque behind her. Its front door was still open, but she didn’t see any sign of Tommi or Frederik. The reflection of a light in the window of one of the portable office trailers at the construction site across the street made her jump, but it was just the streetlights swaying in the heavy wind.
Did she have the strength to try the neighbor’s? Nina looked over at the house next door. Yet another red-brick fort with a single lit window and an impervious front door. She had the utterly stupid desire to cry. Like when she was little, standing alone on the playground with a scraped knee and hundreds of happy, laughing children around her. But it hadn’t done any good then, and it wouldn’t do any good now. She rubbed a hand over her eyes and looked around. There was a birdbath on the little lawn in front of the house, attractively surrounded by fist-sized red, granite rocks.
Nina hobbled down the steps with a firm grasp on the wrought iron railing. One step, two steps … she tried to ignore the pain when she bent down, but as she straightened up with a rock in her hand, she emitted a wheezing groan anyway.
She went back up the stairs and peered in the window. The man had withdrawn so far that she could see only his feet, nervously padding away. She raised the rock and slammed it into the window with all her might. The old man’s double-glazing didn’t surrender until she hit it for the third time, making a hole big enough to pass a fist through. Her reluctant helper had by this time retreated so far back into his hallway that all she could see was his feet, but that didn’t matter.
“Call the police,” she bellowed. “Now!”
SHE SAW THE patrol car long before the pensioner could have even picked up the phone. It drove past her without flashing lights or a siren, pulled up outside the construction site, and turned off its headlights.
Nina grabbed the stair railing and took the three steps down to the front walkway so fast that she crashed to her knees on the flagstones. She got up again and staggered, shuffling and shouting, as fast and as loud as her rib would permit.
“Help.”
She didn’t know how long it had been since Ida had crawled into that oil tank. One hour? Two hours? At any rate it had gotten dark out, and it had been way too long.
“Help.” Nina picked up her pace. “Help. I need help.”
This time she screamed for real.
LOOD OR MONEY. This wasn’t some vague hypothetical choice; it was a practical problem. The blood was flowing out of him with every single heartbeat, and his ability to move, think, and act was flowing away with it. Sándor didn’t know if he was dying or not. Maybe there was no point in speculating about the future.
And the money. The money that Tamás had given his life for. It was all here in his hand, in a gray, blood-smeared envelope that was almost as thick as Blackstone’s International Law.
He didn’t have much time or many options. He clumsily got up onto all fours and couldn’t get any farther than that. Walking and standing were not in his current repertoire. A stab of pain shot through his hole-riddled palm when he put his left hand on the floor, but if he was going to take that envelope, he would have to ignore the pain. It turned out you could reach a point when the pain became irrelevant. What mattered were the mechanics. What you could and what you couldn’t do. He couldn’t stand up without falling down. And if he fell, he would stay down. He could probably crawl on all fours if he used his left hand, too, so that’s what he did.
He crawled past the person in the white suit. At the moment he didn’t care who was lying there inside the suit, nor did he care if th
e man were alive or dead. He didn’t have any spare energy to waste on anger or curiosity. Hand-knee, hand-knee, that was all that mattered. Past the Finn with only half a head. Out of the door. Out.
Halfway across the threshold he was hit by a wave of weakness. His arm buckled, he rolled halfway onto his side, but the doorframe stopped him and keep him from collapsing completely.
“You’re not going to make it, phrala.”
He looked up. There was Tamás, Mulo-Tamás with the red, bleeding eyes.
“Shut up,” Sándor mumbled. “Out of my way! You know this whole thing is your fault, right?”
Mulo-Tamás didn’t move. “Not just my fault,” he said.
Sándor didn’t have the strength to argue with an evil spirit that might not even be there. He tried to crawl farther, but his body wouldn’t obey.
“I did it because I had to,” Mulo-Tamás said. “So the family would survive. So we could get by. Who knows? If you hadn’t turned your back on us, maybe I wouldn’t have fucking needed to.”
“Move,” Sándor repeated feebly.
“You turned your back on us.” Mulo-Tamás’s bloody eyes burned. “You turned your back on your own people, your brother and your sisters, your own mother. Just so you could get by in the gadjo world. And where did it get you? Nowhere. Soon you’ll be as dead as me. And what will happen to the family then? Your death is hardly any purer than mine.”
Sándor’s head sank.
“The money,” Sándor mumbled. “Feliszia’s school. The new roof. An apartment for Vanda. Tamás, I’m not turning my back on them.”
“You just don’t want anyone to know we exist.”
“Yes. Yes, I do. Lujza is going to meet you all. If … well, if she wants to.” I don’t think I have the strength to love someone who isn’t brave enough to be himself, she’d said. But … what if he was brave enough now? What if he could stop being just half a person? Somewhere deep down, he knew perfectly well that that was why he backed down so easily, why he never stood up to confrontation, why he was afraid of the authorities and walked away from most fights—even the most important ones. A half person has a harder time keeping his balance than a whole one. Maybe it was about time he quit being a half-brother, too.
“Phrala,” Sándor said. “Enough now, okay? Te merav. You’re killing me.”
But Mulo-Tamás wasn’t there anymore. There was nothing there.
Sándor clung to the doorframe and managed to pull himself up onto his knees. The front hall was empty. Nina wasn’t lying in the middle of the floor anymore, and he really hoped that was because she had managed to get away, and not because Frederik had dragged her off somewhere.
He wasn’t going to be able to get away. He heard car doors closing and footsteps outside. He had minutes or maybe only seconds left until they were here.
His heart hammered in an attempt to force the blood around his body faster. He clung to the doorframe with both hands and managed to struggle to his feet. The hole in the ceiling was still there, but there was no chance he would be able to reach it and not much chance that he would avoid detection even if he could. But the money. Maybe he could get the money up there.
One try. He didn’t think he had it in him to do any more.
Come on now, phrala. Do it!
He wasn’t sure if the voice came from someone else or if it was from inside him. Wasn’t sure if it was Tamás’s or his own. Maybe it didn’t matter, either. Maybe it was one and the same thing now.
He threw. Flung the envelope up, toward that dark opening up there. It was pretty much going to take a miracle, he thought. And that was exactly what he got—a perfect arc, with more strength than he actually had, and a precision that even on a good day would have been remarkable. The envelope disappeared through the opening into the jumbled chaos of wires and insulation material and darkness.
Sándor staggered a few more steps before his legs gave out. The fall almost killed him, but he managed to crawl another few meters. Then he could go no farther.
He lowered his head on to his one aching arm and lay down to wait for help or judgment. For whatever was going to come next.
Okay, phrala. You did what you could.
DA’S ALIVE. IDA’S alive.
Nina hadn’t noticed she was shaking until the officer had put his jacket across her shoulders. And then he had told her that someone had found Ida. And that she wasn’t dead. She didn’t hear much else of what he said, but it was as if she became aware of herself again in a different way. The pain in her ribs became real. The nausea and the throbbing in her head and her shaking hands, clutching the water bottle the policeman had handed her. They all felt like her, like parts of her. It hurt, but that meant she was alive again. And Ida was alive.
Nina sank back in the seat, watching the scene outside as pain throbbed rhythmically in her right side. There were three police cars parked along the curb now, but none of the officers were in sight. The door they had entered through gaped blackly at the parking lot, and the door to the office trailer was also open now and swinging in the wind. She hoped Sándor was alive. She hoped those shots that had been fired hadn’t been meant for him, but she was consumed by relief over the news about Ida. It was as if there wasn’t room for anything else right now.
A man was walking down the sidewalk. She wouldn’t even have noticed him if he hadn’t sped up as he went past the police cars. It was just a man in a pale raincoat, a man who was out taking a walk in the suburban neighborhood where he surely belonged. It was the low, white silhouettes of the police cruisers that were out of place. But instead of stopping out of curiosity to look at them, he hurried on. And that was why she recognized him.
It was Frederik. And it wasn’t until she looked more closely that she saw there were quite a few things wrong with the picture Mr. Suburbia presented. The raincoat was too big to be his. And the one pocket, the one he was hiding his right hand in, sported a growing bloodstain.
The open door of the office trailer, swinging in the wind … the light she thought she had seen in the window of the hut. Had that been something more than a reflection from the spotlights bobbing on the swaying posts? Had Frederik been hiding there while he got his camouflage worked out?
Nina flung herself across the steering wheel in the front seat and hit the horn. The prolonged honk made the man cower like a gun-shy dog, but then he sped up to a run. And nothing else happened. The officers in the hall either hadn’t heard her, or they were busy, preoccupied with something they thought was more important. Nina pushed the horn down again and held it. This time with the result that the curtains moved very slightly in the anxious old man’s house. Well, that’s not much help, Nina thought dryly.
I parked the Touareg a few blocks away. She suddenly remembered what Frederik had said as he came jogging back, skipping between the puddles in the parking lot, before they went into the mosque. If he made it to the car, he might actually escape. Frederik slowed back down to a just-out-for-an-evening stroll again as he rounded the corner. He was getting away.
Mr. Suburbia. Who had sat there drinking instant soup out of his ugly red ceramic mug while Ida was strapped to that radiator.
Nina had ridden in the ambulance a few times while she was in training, and she had quickly picked up some of the more experienced EMTs’ tricks. One of them was to leave a set of extra keys under one of the sun visors so any driver would be able to start the ambulance when the call came in. She leaned over the driver’s seat in the police car and tilted the visor down. A key landed on the seat with a soft thump, and Nina gingerly shimmied her way into the driver’s seat, pushed the clutch pedal down, and stuck the key in the ignition. She steered the car out onto Lundedalsvej and accelerated toward the corner, without being completely sure what her plan was. She just couldn’t let him get away like that. Not after what he’d done to Ida. And Sándor. And his brother.
She caught sight of him a little farther down the road. He appeared calmer now. Once again looking more and more l
ike a homeowner out for a neighborhood stroll. He didn’t even glance over his shoulder when he turned down yet another side street and briefly disappeared from her view. Turning the corner herself, she was suddenly right on his tail, and this time he couldn’t help but hear her. He turned around on the sidewalk and saw her. Looked into her eyes for the first time.
His hands came up out of his pockets. One was wrapped in blood-soaked toilet paper. The other was holding a gun. She didn’t have time to see any more than that before he aimed the gun at her. He held it in his left hand with his arm out straight in front of him, in a way that wasn’t totally convincing. Nina turned the wheel, slowed the patrol car down, and ducked to the right as the shot hit, causing white chunks of glass to rain down on her like a shower of ice. The right front tire bumped onto the curb, and the engine cut out.
She shook the glass fragments out of her hair. He was still there. He was standing right in front of the car’s white hood, clumsily cocking the gun with his injured hand.
He was crying. Tears of pain, presumably, which was fair enough. And yet she couldn’t shake the thought that it was the cry of a spoiled child. A child who had never before been in real pain.
She turned the key in the ignition and brought the engine back to life just as he raised his gun again. She let out the clutch a little too abruptly, and the car jumped forward in a kangaroo hop before stalling again. But that was enough. The thud on the bumper was firm and satisfying, and Mr. Suburbia disappeared under the front of the car with an indignant howl.
JUNE
PLEASANT, GOLDEN LIGHT fell through the Venetian blinds, and the background noise of clattering trays and serving carts, voices and footsteps, and the distinctive suction-cup shwoop of the automated doors closing were pleasantly muffled. The month of June was in full bloom outside, and the chestnut trees were dropping their sticky yellow-white flowers left and right. Søren had cycled over to Bispebjerg Hospital in drizzle and rain showers, but now it had cleared up. They had let him hang his dripping rain pants and anorak in Ward K’s staff locker room while he questioned Helle Skou-Larsen.
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